Two Shades of Morning Read online

  Sometimes it seemed that the warm manners of those old southern families had been stored with the lumber from their farm houses, as if they’d retired them to accommodate a new age. And yet they still gave. I later learned how unstintingly they gave.

  Those new houses came to resemble the people who lived in them. This new style of living represented their retirements, their attempts at self-indulgence. Mr. Sam and Miss Lavenia even invested in a room air conditioner. All had rented out their farms, eating steaks once a month, instead of once a year, and bought new but plain cars without chrome. Now their dream houses, bright-faced with fresh coats of paint, looked drab next to Sibyl’s. Had she built a house to die in, her dream house, like the dream houses of my neighbors?

  I was still at that stage where I could go to a funeral and leaving the cemetery feel my own untouched newness coursing through my hot body, a breeze on my face—no pain, not even a hangnail—and get high on supper coming up and after that making love. Bold in my own foreverness, that poor soul back there hoisted over his grave, nothing to do with me and mine. My neighbors would die, Mama and Daddy would die, Aunt Birdie would—and then I wouldn’t feel so frisky walking away from their graves. Would Sibyl really die? If she did, so could I.

  I had to quit hating her, just in case. The business about the dress was petty and I knew it, just as I knew it wasn’t all and maybe not half of what it portended. Aunt Birdie had some inkling, and if I could get her talking about the dress, she would tell what was on her mind. Besides, I wanted her to side with me, not so much about the dress as what it stood for; she would understand the injustice, how Sibyl had gaffed me. Aunt Birdie wasn’t above a little spitefulness herself.

  Having always lived across the road, Aunt Birdie was my inherited aunt. The handle of aunt, like the affection, had stuck since the first of countless mustard poultices she’d plastered on my sick-chest. A widow alone, her family was the church and the community—especially me and Mama and Daddy. My high school beauty pageant gown had been sewn by her busy hands, a strapless blue net with flounces of lace. She had stitched a ruffle up on the bust and starched it to stay, to conceal my breasts.

  “Good girls don’t run around showing theirselfs,” she’d said. “I don’t give a hang what the style is!” I had won the beauty pageant, even with that ruffle up to my chin, more relieved than flattered—I wouldn’t have to compete again. The annual beauty pageant was a project of the Future Homemakers of America, and all Home Economics students were obligated to participate, in club and contest, regardless of their qualifications. Student protests were rewarded by a stiff lecture from the Home Economics teacher, Miss Bohannon. Her bleary-green, insinuating eyes could pierce the toughest hide, leaving no doubt in your own heart that you were not only disloyal to your club but irreverent to the universal role of homemaker, and that you probably preferred spending beauty-contest night smooching in a parked car at the county dump.

  I felt as though I’d won the contest by default, because the next-to-the-prettiest girl at Monroe County High, Betty Jean Guess, had started her period before the pageant and refused to go on stage. Some of the boys, out there hooting, might see the bulge of her Kotex through five layers of tulle.

  Foil stars revolved from the stage ceiling on varied lengths of twine. We hoped that the audience could see only glittery, air-spun stars, but we, in our pastel clouds of net, knew the twine was there. The scenic backdrop, tempera globs and strokes of Sunday-school-book blue, green, yellow and red, across a giant scroll of freezer paper, was what it was, up close. (The theme of the pageant was “Stairway to the Stars,” emblazoned in silver glitter on paper taped to the back curtain.) From the rear of the ancient, musty auditorium, red and yellow finger-dots blurred to fields of flowers on palm-swirls of green pastures. The tree trunks, fists of muddy brown, had emerged into the shape of live oaks. We’d been amazed. Up close, on stage, we had to hold on to the vision from a distance to avoid disillusionment.

  Looking back, I believe I had to hang onto that vision-from-afar of Robert Dale and P.W. or my illusions would have been shattered long before they were.

  Posted like waiters in a fine restaurant, one on each stairway to the stage, Robert Dale and P.W. ushered the contestants on and off stage. Not only were we exhibited onstage, but between judges’ decisions, we were forced to sit with the audience, straining against a collective gaze. Perched stiffly forward, so the net wouldn’t scrub our backs, we endured the hoots, whistles and jeers from the audience. Elbows out for comfort, and to prevent crushing the octopus orchid on my waist, I could see Mama and Daddy mouthing encouragement to me. Aunt Birdie sat complacently on the other side of Mama, fanning with one of the programs that we, the contestants, had typed and mimeographed.

  Robert Dale and P.W. posed at the foot of the stairs in identical white sports coats. Hands clasped over their crotches, they wrangled with black bow ties by craning their necks and swayed to the repetitious melody being cranked out on the piano by Miss Effie, our church pianist. Placed in the center at the foot of the stage, the piano tinkled on under her caressing fingers. Her graying chestnut head remained perfectly still as she played sheets and sheets of music for two hours, each piece a rendition of the last, the tinkling swallowed by the hiss and burble of the auditorium.

  P.W. smiled and winked my way, strutting his stocky chest. I recognized the sneer for the Future Farmers of America, which he had been pressured into representing. He was flushed from the heat, bothered by the crowd, and eager to drive the winner home—either me or Betty Jean, I suspected. At intervals, he would sneak a small black comb from his rear pocket and rake it through his blonde hair. Then glancing my way, he’d smile, mouthing words I couldn’t decipher. He had already said, “You got it, Earlene!” as he’d escorted me down on wobbly high-heels, following the semi-finalists’ presentation.

  “I don’t want it,” I lied between gritted teeth. I did so want it: after Betty Jean dropped out, only the homely remained. I would never go to school again if I didn’t win.

  Aunt Birdie had known in advance who would win, and she hadn’t hesitated to say so—not in words though. Mere words couldn’t match her gritty expressions. Ambling in that night, arms akimbo, she’d shouted my name in a smug and satisfied look. Overhead fans blew at wisps of her red hair as her languid pace quickened on the downslope of concrete to the front. Glowering at the rows of collapsible wooden chairs, she sidled through and sat. She called the chairs “kid-catchers,” because during any school program, a child could be heard squealing murderously, having stood in the seat and been gobbled up whole in the gap between the back and the bottom. Any attempt to free the frantic child would be made more torturous, because if he turned sideways, the mama or daddy would tug futilly, bringing on a siren of screams from the child and a rescue team of other experienced mamas and daddies and draw attention to the embarrassing predicament. Crawling beneath to turn the child face-forward, one of the grownups would try to persuade the child that all he had to do was let go. Trust me.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 4

  On the coming-up side of Aunt Birdie’s cabin stood her crumbling brick well, which she still used on occasion to keep in water-drawing practice. In defense of her use of the archaic bucket-and-teakle method, she’d go on and on about what if the electricity went off and she couldn’t “draw” water from a spigot. Nobody could convince her that Lance Walker, sheriff and county commissioner, didn’t control us all with his private/city water works. Every month or so, he would cut off our water for hours to drain the old tank, and when he turned it on again, a ribbon of rust would unravel from the spigots for days—barely enough to “draw” a bath—and still we had to pay the same amount for water that month.

  Always jumping on Lance, Aunt Birdie went crazy when she learned that the plate glass windows in the new brick courthouse didn’t open—didn’t need to, so said Lance, because the flat-top building was equipped with air conditioning. Again, she’d start in on “what if t
he lectricity goes off.”

  Her yard she’d carved out of gum woods in an exact square, and hoed up any plant that sprouted without permission within the neat boundary. What was permitted to grow were bleached purple petunias, peeping up each spring inside circles of dome-glass electrical insulators, which she’d saved from the old power poles. Prisms of sunlight danced from the aqua glass to the leached cabin walls around sunbursts of resin drawn by the heat of ancient summers.

  Inside was warm and homey, with her hand-stitched quilts and Bees-waxed furniture, as much home to me as Mama’s big white house across the road. Aunt Birdie’s place was where I’d gone to sulk when I was growing up, and where I still went when I was on the outs with P.W. Not a very grown-up to do, but I didn’t have to be grown-up with Aunt Birdie. I didn’t have to be anything but what I was—moody, moonstruck or just miserable with me.

  “Anybody home?” I called, going up the cedar-trimmed steps of the big white house.

  “In here, honey,” Mama called back.

  From the dim hall wafted smells of mothballs and brassy water from the aged pitcher pump on the back-porch water-shelf, kept for sentimental reasons when Daddy had walled the porch in for a den. Though they no longer used the pump, the sandy dirt around the house smelled steeped in the brassy water-shelf runoff. A clatter of sticks resounded from the front room on my right, and I opened the door to the smell of burning oak. On the caving hearth, a log had burned center to ends, the last fire of winter. Aunt Birdie was standing in the middle of the high-ceiled room, lowering the wooden quilting frame to the floor and gathering the riggings. The frame looked empty and pointless without the patchwork of quilts usually swaging before the fire. “Well, if it ain’t Miss Earlene!” said Aunt Birdie, deftly reeling one of the cords from her thumb to her elbow.

  “I didn’t know what all that noise was coming from.” I laughed and kissed her crepe-papery cheek. She was old but never old-lady sweet; I thought of her as olden, an olden woman, as in olden days. But something about her salty tone crawled all over me.

  “I’m right here, honey,” Mama said, rising from her knees before the trunk with a bundle of sweaters. She dumped them on her bed and crossed the room to hug me.

  Her fine white hair webbed over my eyes. I stepped back and gazed at her elfin face, made smaller by her blown-up hair. On weekends, she wore her hair in waves, which she set in rows with long metal clamps, but at home during the week she let it fly wild.

  “You all right, honey?” she asked and pressed a hand to my forehead.

  “Yes’um,” I said. “I’m fine.” She always did that and I always said that. If we skipped it we’d be lost.

  Aunt Birdie eyed me around the reel of cords and skittered the collapsed frame across the heart-pine floor. “Daddy said he saw you had company this morning when he went to the post office,” said Mama.

  “Sibyl Sharp,” I said.

  “Visiting, huh?”

  “Yes ‘em.” I watched Aunt Birdie as she unscrewed the spindles on the frame. Then I tried her. “Came by to be neighborly.” She didn’t even flinch.

  “Well,” said Mama, folding sweaters on the bed with her back to me, “I’m glad you two girls are getting to know one another.”

  Another test: “She’s dying, you know?” I said. “Some kind of rare blood cancer, I heard.” “Rare!” Aunt Birdie spat snuff juice into the fire.

  And then it came to me what was nagging: she’d called me Miss Earlene, same as Miss Sibyl. Mama knelt again before the chest, stacking and smoothing the sweaters inside. “Sibyl’s just melodramatic, Birdie, like a lot of young girls.”

  “You don’t believe she’s dying?” I asked.

  “She looks healthy as a horse to me,” Mama said. If you didn’t have a fever, you weren’t sick.

  I’d started to tell Aunt Birdie that I would take her and Mama shopping on Friday but decided to wait. “Where’s Daddy?” I asked.

  “Out back piddling. He’ll be in here anytime now looking for his dinner.” Mama dropped the bowed lid of the trunk. “You’ll stay and eat,” she added, up and scrambling around the sprawl of quilt riggings.

  #

  Sunlight flowed through the south window in the kitchen, as I sat at the round oak table. Long ago, we’d each laid claim to a certain chair, even Aunt Birdie, though hers was the company chair when she wasn’t there. In high school, when Robert Dale or P.W. ate with us, I’d steer them to that chair to keep them from sitting in Daddy’s armed ladder-back at the curve on the north end of the kitchen. Not that he would have made a fuss, but he would squirm and mumble when the usual order of the household was disturbed. His recliner in the living room was another matter; he would tell them right off to get up. “Sit on the couch or over yonder,” he’d say, his gentle countenance taking on the sternness of Granny Colson’s, who glowered from the portrait above the mantelpiece: down-slanted eyes penciled in a grim face; coarse hair sketched back on her ball-shaped head; heavy dark brows remarking on our Indian heritage, though Daddy claimed the Colson’s were pure Irish. She left a legacy of having given birth to Daddy at dawn and then going to her garden to gather a mess of collard greens for dinner.

  Her touched-up portrait was one of two left to me. Not a trace of humor was spelled out on Granny’s face, only suffering, which I’d not then learned to read. The other one, Sibyl’s, haunts me more with its absence of suffering, even in the throes of dying.

  Mama dumped a bowl of congealed field peas, left over from Sunday dinner, into a pot on the stove while Aunt Birdie perched on a stool at the counter and sliced tomatoes into thick red pinwheels. Daddy stamped up the back doorsteps, scrubbing his feet along the hall, and stopped in the kitchen doorway with a grand gesture—once-powerful arms outstretched and face beaming with cheap surprise. “Natalene, what’s that youngun doing dragging back here everytime I turn around?” he teased. “I thought we’d got shed of her.” I got up to kiss him. Modestly, he offered his sweaty shaved cheek, holding my shoulders to prevent contact with his body. Intimacy in our household had its limits. But we all behaved as though I lived a thousand miles away and had finally come home for a visit. We repeated the ritual yesterday and we’d repeat it tomorrow.

  Another repeat: “Dinner smells good,” he said. “What’re we having?” Though he knew full-well that Mondays brought leftovers from Sundays.

  He washed up at the kitchen sink, lathering his hands and arms and splashing great hands full of water to his vieny, sunned face, while Mama scurried for a paper towel to keep him from drying on her dishtowel.

  “Well, what’s your old man up to this evening?” he asked, drying his arms and frowning at the rattley paper.

  “Working,” I said—what I knew to say, especially on Mondays, even if P.W. had gone fishing.

  Noisily Daddy scraped back his chair and sat, walking it to the table, and Mama presented him with a tall glass of iced tea, then went again to the counter for the others. Aunt Birdie crept over with her circular arrangement of tomatoes and lowered the platter to the table.

  “Daddy, turn thanks,” Mama said, standing with her enlarged hands on the back of her chair.

  “Lord, we thank you for this food we are about to receive and for the hands that prepared it. Bless it to the nourishment of our bodies. In Jesus name I do pray. Amen.” Immediately, he began eating.

  I waited for a few minutes before I asked, “Daddy, what do you think of our new church member?”

  “Which one’s that, punkin?” He pushed peas to his spoon with a wedge of cornbread.

  Nobody but Sibyl had joined our church in at least six months. “Sibyl,” I said, “you know, Robert Dale’s wife.”

  “Oh, yeah. A fine looking woman.”

  “She’s got her ways,” Mama said. “Have some pot roast, Birdie.” She passed a platter of indistinguishable hunks of browned beef and potatoes.

  “Believe I will.” Aunt Birdie picked in the hash for meat. “Y’all big buddies, I reckon?” Daddy said.


  “Not really.” I searched Aunt Birdie’s freckle-clustered face. She was a blank. “Sibyl’s kind of hard to get to know. She’s got some kind of rare blood cancer.”

  “Them two go together?” he asked absently.

  “Sir?”

  He raised his voice. “Sounded like you were saying you couldn’t get to knowing her cause she’s got cancer.” “No sir, I meant...”

  “Dying ain’t rare,” he said. “Pass me another piece of cornbread, thank you, ma’am.” He said the first part to me and the second part to Mama, never looking up, and each of us took what was ours.

  “No, Daddy,” Mama chipped in. “Earlene meant Sibyl’s curious.”

  “Oh! I don’t know nothing about that. A fine-looking woman.”

  I couldn’t resist it. “What about her wearing that old dress on Easter?”

  “I didn’t notice nothing wrong with what the lil ole thing was wearing.” He stared up at me suspiciously.

  “Why, Earlene Claire Colson!” Mama said loudly, ready with a sermon. “You’ve had better raising than to pick on what somebody wears to church.” Her narrow shoulders hiked. “Making fun of people’s unbecoming, young lady. Isn’t it, Daddy?”

  He grunted, hunched over his plate.